Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (6 page)

Washington also mentions picnics as a summer activity, but these seem to
have been smaller and more low-key than the barbecues. In August of 1772,
four of his friends arrived at Mount Vernon on a Monday evening, and the
next day the five men went fishing on the Belvoir estate, below Mount Vernon.
They dined outside that afternoon, presumably on the fish they had caught
earlier in the day.14 On another occasion, he rode on horseback up to John son's Spring one Saturday, accompanied by Martha Washington's eighteenyear-old niece, Fanny Bassett, his own Canadian-born secretary, William
Shaw, and a visiting gentleman, George Taylor Jr. There they rendezvoused
with a group of friends from Alexandria, "dined on a cold dinner brought
from Town by Water, and spent the Afternoon agreeably, returning home by
Sun down or a little after it."5

NOTES

i. Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation, 1989), 14.

2. Landon Carter, vol. 2 of The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752-1778,
ed. Jack P. Greene (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Virginia Historical
Society, 1965), 2:722, 900.

3. For Washington's attendance at barbecues, see George Washington, May 27,1769; August 4, i77o; September 4, 18, 1773; and May 7, August 27, 1774, in The Diaries of George
Washington, 6 vols., ed. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1976-79), 2:154, 261; 3:203, 204, 248, 271.

4. For the provision of flour for a barbecue, see "Cash Receive'd on Act. of Colo. Washington by L.W.," May 1774, Lund Washington Account Book (manuscript, W-693, Mount
Vernon Ladies' Association; typescript, Mount Vernon Ladies' Association), 48.

5. Washington, August 2-4, 1770, Diaries of George Washington, 2:261.

6. Washington, September 4, 1773, and May 7, 1774, ibid., 3:203, 248.

7. For Washington bringing home guests after a barbecue, see Washington, September
4-5, 18, 1773, and May 7, 1774, ibid., 3:203, 204, 248. For George Washington as the guest of
others after a barbecue, see Washington, May 27, 1769, and August 4, 1770, ibid., 2:154, 261.

8. Washington, May 7, 1774, ibid., 3:248, 248n.

9. Artist Charles Willson Peale, quoted in ibid., 3:221n. See also Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play, 79-81.

10. The Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, September 12, 1779, in George Washington as the
French Knew Him: A Collection of Texts, ed. and trans. Gilbert Chinard (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1940; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 75.

u. Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play, 81-84.

12. The 1799/1800 inventory done shortly after George Washington's death is published
in Eugene E. Prussing, "Appendix II: Inventory of Contents of Mount Vernon;" in The Estate of George Washington, Deceased (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927), 401-48; the reference to
the lignum vitae balls can be found on p. 438.

13. Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play, 44; Merilyn Simonds Mohr, The Games Treasury
(Shelburne, Vt.: Chapters Publishing, 1993), 310-11.

14. Washington, August 1o, u, 1772, Diaries of George Washington, 3:124.

15. Washington, September 10, 1785, ibid., 4:192. For the identities of Shaw and Taylor,
see ibid., 4:158, 158n, 19on.

Many will argue that it is the Southern cook's prowess with hog by-products
that is our region's culinary signature. Indeed, the pig in all its manifestations
has put its stamp on much of our culture. After all, in the South it's a compliment to say someone lives "high on the hog." When Southerners make white
beans or greens, they are more like pork stew (pork being so necessary we
don't mention it). Despite the expression, "to sweat like a pig," pigs only have
sweat glands in their snouts and have inefficient systems to regulate body temperature. (Humans are actually the sweatiest of all animals, with horses a close
second.) Yet one of the great geological mistakes of all time is that as the continents shifted, swine ended up in all temperate regions of the world except
North and South America.

It wasn't until 1493, when Christopher Columbus deposited a Spanish hog
in Cuba, handpicked by Queen Isabella, that pigs arrived in the New World.
Twenty-seven years later Admiral Alonso Alvarez de Pinana may have lost
some of his porkers around Mobile, but it was when Hernando de Soto and
his six hundred armor-clad men traversed the Gulf Coast in the early 1540s
that swine officially made landfall in our region. Pigs would arrive in the Gulf
South at a time when the consumption of pork was a Christian duty for every
Spanish-speaking Catholic. Reay Tannahill reveals in Food in History that during the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) it became obligatory to have pork
simmering in a cauldron or chorizo, dried pork sausages, hanging from the
rafters as a sure proof that no Jew or Muslim dined in the Christian home. De
Soto certainly performed his Christian duty when he deposited fifteen hogs in
Florida: within five years this herd had multiplied to more than seven hundred pigs.

Despite the popular misconception, the purebred, long-snouted, bristle backed wild boars (Sus scrofa), kissing cousins of the domestic hog, did not
make the transatlantic journey to our shores until about four hundred years
after Columbus deposited pigs in the New World. Full-blooded wild boars are
aggressive and clever, weighing between four hundred and six hundred
pounds, making them popular prey for sportsmen. (Young boars are considered mildly palatable, while a mature boar is so tough that even the French
won't eat any of it, except perhaps the head.) The Eurasian wild boar, which
hails from Russia, first appeared in North America in 1890 when it was introduced to Sullivan County, New Hampshire, by a hunter.

With the advent of World War I, American hunters were no longer able to
tramp through the hills and dales of Bavaria tracking wild boars. (Wild boar
was so overhunted that it became extinct in the British Isles by 1683.) Thus, in
1912 a group of hunters imported a stock of wild boars from Europe to the
mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. This breed tipped the scales at a
hefty six hundred pounds. Before you could say "oink-oink," these porkers
had run amuck, rooting, foraging across seventeen states, and spreading trouble. They are predators of wildlife such as nesting songbirds and wild turkeys.
They promote erosion, damage fences, and transmit diseases such as hog
cholera and tuberculosis to domestic pigs and sheep. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture considers all wild boars and feral hogs to be pests.

While there is relatively little controversy regarding pork consumption in
the American South, in much of the world pork is the most controversial of
foods. Muslims and Jews are forbidden from eating pork by religious law. In
other places, the culture frowns on pork consumption. The relatively new science of paleoethnobotany fills in some of the gaps about what was prepared
on the now-silent stone hearths of our respective ancient ancestors. At the
same time, it does little to explain why civilized people evolved into diverse
cultures, happily munching certain foods while disdaining others. Obviously
the prime reason for the consumption of some unsavory animals has to do
with simple necessity. The French must be applauded for their culinary ecumenicism. For example, Cooper's entrecote a la bordelaise is the haute name for
rat grilled with a little oil and shallots. According to Prosper Montagne's
Larousse Gastronomic (1961), "Rats nourished in the wine stores of the
Gironde were at one time highly esteemed." There is speculation that bordelaise sauce was actually created to overpower the musky rodent taste of rat.
The Aztecs did not have pork, but they roasted the hairless xquintli, a dog still
bred in Mexico, in a tomato-and-chili sauce similar to our barbecue sauce.
While the consumption of rat and dog may make us squeamish, there is no
nutritional consideration that engenders more cultural and religious taboos than that highly intelligent, cloven-hoofed domestic mammal, the swine.
Deer are also cloven-hoofed, but it is only the hog associated in mythology
with the devil and Pan.

Ethnoanthropology reveals that peoples of the Holy Land had been dining
on hogs for more than five thousand years before pork became taboo. Tannahill concludes in Food in History that the precise date when the antipork regulations were instated is debatable, but that there is a clear correlation between their implementation and the arrival of nomadic invaders to eastern
and western Asia about 1800 B.C.E. (Second Millennium). These pastoral
tribes had been herding goats and sheep for thousands of years. "They seem
to have an almost pathological hatred for the pig-a wayward beast with little
stomach, a constitutional objection to being herded and a tiresome inability
to live on grass," notes Tannahill. Hebrews arrived in Egypt at the end of the
seventeenth century B.C.E., where they remained for more than three hundred years until the thirteenth century B.C.E. The first known Hebrew writings date from c. 1000 B.C.E. In the Old Testament, Yahweh is quoted in the
Book of Genesis and again in Leviticus as condemning the pig as being so unclean it pollutes if touched. Deuteronomy 14 specifically dictates to the children of God which animals they may consume: oxen, sheep and goats, "the
hart, and the roebuck, and the fallow deer, and the pygarg, and the chamois.
Nevertheless we shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or them that divide
the cloven hoof as the camel and the hare and the coney (rabbit): for they chew
the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean to you. And the
swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto
you: ye shall not eat of the flesh, nor touch their dead carcass." (Also on the
"unclean menu" are eagles, owls, hawks, swans, pelicans, storks, and bats.)
But in Acts 10:15 of the New Testament, God tells Peter, "What God has
cleansed, you must not call unclean."

Allah instructed his prophet Mohammed some fifteen hundred years later
that the followers of Islam must follow the same divine pig-shunning practice
of the Jews. Mohammed warned that pigs had been spawned from the excrement of elephants that had piled up on Noah's ark. Theories abound that perhaps it was a sound ecological strategy for Yahweh and Allah to ban the pig in
their dry, arid lands. Pigs would have been the ultimate luxury, competing with
man for scarce grains and fresh water. A few historians speculate that the ban
on swine came to define the very barriers of Islamic expansion. They note that
the Islamic religion spread rapidly out of Arabia in the seventh century c.E.,
yet its spread halted in China, the Balkans, and Spain, three pork-passionate
regions. Early Christians closely followed Jewish regulations in prohibiting contact with hogs. But by the third century C.E. the bishops of Antioch had
decided that perhaps old Yahweh might have been mistaken. European proponents of the omnivorous hog appreciated the efficiency with which hogs
convert grains, tubers, and just about any garbage it is fed to high-grade fat
and protein. By destigmatizing the pig, the early Christian church was also
greasing the way for a smooth spiritual path for the conversion of barbaric
northern European hog-loving tribes.

Thus by 597 C.E. Benedictine monks had brought the word of God to the
hog-worshipping Celts in the British Isles. For peoples from the ancient Celts
to many Asian cultures and the natives of New Guinea, hogs are both sacred
and succulent. Pork was consumed on all-important occasions from birth to
death. Pigs were sacrificed and gorged upon to enlist the help of the gods in
times of war, to honor warriors in thanksgiving for victory, and to mourn ancestors. In ancient Norse mythology pork was what the warriors of the Norse
god Odin dined on in Valhalla.

As to the French passion for pork, culinary legend insists that Louis xv1 literally lost his head in 1793 over pork. The story goes that had the fleeing
thirty-nine-year-old Louis xvi not demanded that his driver let him stop at a
tavern famed for pigs' trotters in garlic sauce, he would have succeeded in his
escape from house arrest in 1791.